Category: Distance Education

Yesterday at Convocation in Athabasca, I was deeply honoured by my former colleagues at Athabasca by being installed into the Order of Athabasca University. Most other members have been individuals from the community who have made exceptional contributions to the University. I was the first Faculty member (other than Dominique Abrioux, who also served as […]

I started out my teaching career as a “shop teacher” – teaching middle school students how to work and built with a number of technologies. Thus, it was a bit disturbing to listen to recent CBC radio broadcast listing jobs that have disappeared and to hear that ‘shop teachers’ along with elevator operators, typists and […]

I’ve been fascinated by the role of interaction all of my career as both a student, a researcher and a teacher. Michael Moore’s famous article details the role of the ‘big three’ (student-student, student-content, student-teacher) interactions and influenced Randy Garrison and I to explore the other 3 possibilities (teacher-teacher, teacher-content and content-content interactions). I’ve written a […]

One of the challenges in designing any educational program is balancing the need for individual freedom (of pace, space, relationship, technology and other freedoms that Jon Dron and I have described in Teaching Crowds) with the benefits of social learning. Maximizing freedom leads down a path of individualized and self-paced programming. It may be possible […]

We certainly are past the famed “Year of the Mooc” but there availability and I will argue impact on adult education is far from past. This week’s special issue edited by Markus Deimann, Sebastian Vogt adds many new insights – a few of which I’ll comment on in this post. The first article MOOCs and […]

This week I am privileged to be a keynote speaker at the 21st International Congress of the Brazilian Association for Distance Education in Bento Goncalves, Brazil. The scholarly stimulation, hospitality, weather and fine Brazilian wine have been great – but something is wrong. Only 1 of the 12 keynote speakers and none of the 10 […]

I am just recovering this week from a busy, celebration filled week last that I want to share with my blog friends. The week started by a quick trip to Barcelona, where besides being able to watch FBT Barcelona win the final Champion League match, I was honoured being made a Senior Fellow in the […]

I’ve always been interested in studies that help us differentiate both pedagogies and educational technology use, based upon time requirements. These studies of course should include all the actors – too often student time is taken as a free given. Thus, a recent publication by Gusman Edouard tweaked my interest. Edouard, G. (2015). Effectiveness of […]

I don’t usually comment on articles in “closed” journals, but making an exception in this case. I hope you can find it in a library data base, or one of the authors uploads it to a public site or you can “rent ” it from Wiley for 48 hours for $6! The article: Casquero, O., Ovelar, R., Romo, […]

This week I am in the process of moving my office from Athabasca University to home. It was a lot of work sorting, selecting and shifting. Most of the books that I THINK I still want are now on the bookshelves here at home. However, I have doubts as to their usefulness, as the texts (of […]